1) Everything Gonna Be All Right

(or, Trading Body Blows with

the Ghost of Victor Smith)

The night was thick, black and nasty

and my mattress was a raft drifting down

a mighty Mississippi of memory,

a Viking longboat in which my broken

warrior-poet’s form had been placed

and sent downstream through the silver-grey mists

of eternity and on to the far bright shores of my

forefathers and their fathers before them,

only to be turned away from those fearsome

gates for being insufficiently deceased.

And, lately, it seems like I’ve been waking up

in the middle of varying stages of dream-state

at all my former places of residence, feeling around

the bed for some imaginary former spouse

or significant other, freaking out about

being late to some former place of employment

and whatever it is I’m gonna say (this time?)

to placate whichever former employer.

I can’t help but believe if things continue

at this rate, eventually, I’ll bolt awake thinking

I’m late for my first day of kindergarten (though,

hopefully my mother will also be on hand to say,

It’s OK, little man. It’s only Saturday. Go out and play).

And then there’s that recurring one where,

in what some new age, metaphysical,

guided meditation counselor type might

call a deep subterranean cave of me,

some here-to-fore unknown (or merely suspected)

part of me suddenly cracks and snaps off

like a massive icicle or stalactite, morphing

on its way down into another more fully actualized me,

a new and improved me, you could say,

and hits the ground running like Jesse Owens

at the ’36 Olympics.

And let’s just say, for the sake of the poem

(and your, most likely, all-too-brief relationship with it),

that this new and improved me is actually you

and it’s not a slimy or treacherous cave floor

that your feet have found but a cool, rain-slicked street

late at night in some industrial part of town

you don’t recognize.

And just over there to the right,

maybe fifty, sixty feet away at most,

there’s a freight train blowing out

its big, brassy basso profundo

as it slows down to take the curve

and it’s not even an issue of nerve

or wanting it bad enough ‘cause you know

you can make it this time, man,

and you don’t even have a suitcase

or bag or nothing,

but that shit don’t even matter ‘cause everything’s

gonna be different from here on out if you can

just catch that train, man, everything gonna be just fine

if you can just keep runnin’ and sayin’ it

and sayin’ it and sayin’ it:

everything gonna be alright,

everything gonna be alright,

everything gonna be alright,

everything…

2) Wide, Low and Slow

Broke

down

Massy-

Furgeson,

abandoned and left

for dead somewhere out here near what

must be, more or less, the middle of this over-grown

cornfield, smack-dab on the Kansas / Missouri

     border, who knows how many years ago,

upon which the scarecrow of an old cracked plaster

mannequin (with straw cowboy hat

and canvas gloves) is

casually

straddled,

as

if

he

were

kickin’

way back and

rolling: wide, low and

slow, down the boulevard of time,

like he aint got a motherfuckin’ care in the world,

and, with there nothing else to do and no where

      else to be, who knows, maybe he doesn’t.

3) Old Man with a Cane

Leaning on a Mailbox, by

the Side of the Road

There’s an old man with

a cane, leaning on a mail-

box full of bullet

holes, by the side of

a two-lane highway, and an

18-wheeler is

rounding the curve, just

about a quarter-mile down

the road (coming to

us from Cooper Hill,

Mt. Sterling, Rosebud and parts

unknown (and beyond):

a yellow butter-

fly caught in its grill, a red

balloon tied to the

passenger-side rear-

view mirror, a hawk hanging

on the bright blue wind.

4) 50% off

It was a store that

specialized in used past lives

and even had a

     discount bin near the counter

     where you could get as much as

          50% off somedays.

5) Strange Bright Birds

I

think

about

those women,

sometimes, who fluttered

in and out of my life, every

now and then, like strange, bright birds with the power to stop

my heart, my breathing, my ability to speak

     or think, even, the spinning of the

earth, hell, time itself, and I wonder where some of them

are these days, all these years later,

where their lives lead them,

and did some-

one, for

some

of

them

at

least, turn

out to be

the “one” about which

so many movies and novels and

songs are cranked out every year, but what

I guess I mostly think about are all the things

     I could have done differently.

Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two books of

poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full

of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could

one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless

love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-

residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted

P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an

editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has

appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly,

Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag,

The Arkansas Review and various other journals and

anthologies. His latest collection of poems is “Bullet Holes

in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets) Back of the

Class Press, 2024)).” He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO

with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named

Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks,

near the Gasconade River, where there are also many

strange and wonderful woodland critters.